12/06/2010

After a groundbreaking summit in Poland, President Dmitry Medvedev will head to Brussels on Tuesday for much harder talks with European Union leaders. Analysts said it was unlikely that the talks would result in much substantial progress.

The federal budget will supply 300 billion rubles ($9.6 billion) of funding for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, excluding airports and roads, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Friday. Experts say some of that funding will help accelerate regional development.

United Russia has to deal with tough political competition in the country, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Monday, contradicting President Medvedev's recent criticism that the ruling party risks becoming an appendix of the executive branch.

Foreign investors are more interested in the legal environment, tax incentives and attitude of the authorities in a region than location, natural resources or infrastructure, according to research released Friday.

Government officials said Friday that while the number of highly skilled foreign specialists working in Russia under a new, simplified visa regime is “not big,” a significant increase in takeup is expected next year.

Banks operating in Russia, including Sberbank and HSBC, are finding themselves in a rush to patent names for their products and services to protect their marketing campaigns during the holidays and beyond from lawsuits by rivals.

Blogger and activist Alexei Navalny opened on Saturday a web site to track corruption linked to state tenders. The site, designed to resemble a government web site, is called RosPil in a reference to the Russian slang word for the embezzlement of state funds.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin outlined plans for a multibillion-dollar extension of the Trans-Siberian Railroad on Monday, which he said would boost commodities production and investment in the Far East.

Investigators were considering Sunday whether the pilots who crash-landed a Tu-154 at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport over the weekend were heros for saving 165 of the 167 people on board or responsible for the emergency that required the landing.

A Bashkortostan district court banned as extremist the memoirs of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini on Monday, but an independent analyst dismissed the measure as a cheap ploy by local authorities to boost their anti-extremism record.

The Russian government has been ordered to pay a record fine of 1.7 million euros ($2.3 million) to 29 residents of a Chechen village bombed by the Air Force during a military campaign in 2000, Kommersant reported.

President Dmitry Medvedev said Monday that Russian firms wants to take part in the privatization of Polish companies and promised to cooperate with Poland in investigating a plane crash in the Smolensk region that killed Poland's president in April.

People looking for information on court proceedings will soon be able to receive information via e-mail or even cell phone text messages, the head of the Supreme Court's judicial department said, RIA-Novosti reported.

The Moscow branch of the pro-Kremlin liberal Right Cause party has fired its head, celebrity lawyer Igor Trunov, over the “unsatisfactory results” of the branch's work, the party said on its web site Monday.

A former Komi prosecutor who made a YouTube appeal to President Dmitry Medvedev over “fabricated” charges that resulted in two people getting life prison terms was sentenced to 18 months in jail for giving false evidence.

Issue 4535

A passenger’s photo showing people fleeing a Tu-154 passenger jet that made an emergency landing at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport on Saturday.